Looking back on

2019​

Let’s rewind and update you on our journey to connect brands to their biggest fans.

Our biggest year yet

In 2019 our platform grew faster than ever. We added new global brands like jeans brand G-Star RAW and luxury sneaker brand Golden Goose. We also launched the first brands of the Bestseller group with Selected and Jack & Jones. We served more and more consumers with one of the best mobile shopping experiences out there.

2019 in numbers

Strong brands can’t ignore the power of great apps anymore and this reflected in the numbers. Conversion rates, revenue, engagement of our apps all grew significantly in 2019. We fully expect these to keep growing as we keep optimizing our platform in 2020.

A bigger piece of the pie

Customers love great apps and this is reflected by the increasing share of total business our apps generate. Our apps do more than a third of the total business and grow at a much faster rate.

+400% (!) conversion rates

There is just no comparison between our apps and mobile web. Across the platform for all brands our apps are the best performing direct to consumer channel – beating even desktop by 2 to 4 times.

App users spend six times more

App users are loyal users who come back often and buy more. Their spend is up to six times higher than web customers.

relentless focus on customer experience

Getting better, all the time

In 2019, our growing design and engineering team shipped 32 new features. We are continously looking for ways to make the platform more effortless, personal and inspirational to improve the customer experience and grow the business as a result.

Home experience redesign

The best place to inspire customers is the home experience. In 2019 we upgraded home to keep up with new mobile design standards. The new home is like breath of fresh air generating more attention to brand merchandise.

AI Recommendations

Personalisation is critical to the future of e-commerce. That’s why we introduced personal recommendations, a recommendation system based on AI and user behaviour.

A new way to browse

This year we introduced ‘Search Categories’ as an additional way to browse the catalog. Accessible from the Search view, it allows customers to quickly drill down categories and find the products they’re looking for.

In-cart promotions

Sometimes a relevant promotion can be the difference between a successful sale or an abandoned cart. With our new Cart Messages feature, these promotions are presented at the right place and the right time.

Android

This year we expanded our Android team to go even faster on developing new features and improvements for the Android platform. We made great progress in closing the gap with features that were already available on iOS and released some major updates together with iOS.

Android highlights

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behind the scenes

Focus on foundation & stability

A huge part of the value that the Highstreet platform offers takes place behind the scenes. Our wonderful backend team is continuously working on improving our technology stack to improve stability, speed and performance. We are constantly looking for new ways to keep the Highstreet platform a well-oiled machine and build a scalable foundation for upcoming features.

Keep track of what your customers do in the app

With our new “Events API” we can track customer events that happen in the app and send them to various platforms (MarketingCloud, Google analytics, and more). This way you are able to empower your tools with consumer behaviour data from the Highstreet apps.

Firebase migration

With Google sunsetting Analytics as a way of tracking mobile app events, we made the mandatory transition to Firebase Analytics.

Back in stock notifications

Your favourite product sold out? No problem. Our backend team has been working on the foundations for our upcoming back in stock feature.

Stability improvements

Some examples are improved “Circuit breakers” and “Pool deadlines” which we use to keep the app responsive when an external system is down or requests for data are failing.

Ruby upgrade

To improve the code and stability of the Highstreet platform we did a big update to a newer version of Ruby.

Highstreet studio

Managing content can be easy

Just like the Android team, we expanded the Studio team to create even more features in 2020. Last year we added some highly demanded features to Studio. Managing your content has become even easier than before.

Scheduling has never been this easy

It is now possible to easily copy schedule settings to other storefronts with a few clicks. Select the desired date and time, then copy these settings to storefronts that need the same schedule time.

In-cart promotions in 3 easy steps

With the release of cart messages on iOS and Android, we made it possible to easily create and manage these in Studio. Just like you are used to when creating push notifications.

partnership

G-Star RAW + Highstreet

“We have chosen Highstreet Mobile as the platform to deliver the G-Star RAW app because of their proven track record and consistently high marks in the app stores. Their focus on high quality UX and attention to details matches exactly what we value as a brand. The results of the app have exceeded our expecations and we’re very happy with the collaboration.”

September 2019

Jeffrey Duyvesteijn

Global E-commerce Manager @ G-Star RAW

Amazing NEW BRANDS

Welcome to the platform!

In 2019 we welcomed many amazing new brands to the Highstreet platform – here are a few of them. Some are already live and some will celebrate their app launch in 2020. Welcome!